


Declared Dead - Reunion

by peskylilcritter



Series: Declared Dead [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Children, F/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:18:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peskylilcritter/pseuds/peskylilcritter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendy remembers a time when losing Dean would have killed her, but she’s spent the past year getting used to the idea.</p><p>The thing with Adam shakes Dean in ways he refuses to contemplate.<br/>He’s already standing on her doorstep before it occurs to him that Wendy probably doesn’t know that he’s back from the dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Declared Dead - Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> Next, and certainly not last, in the series.
> 
> Spans Season 4 up to Jump the Shark, but mentions very little of the events covered on the show.

For Wendy, Dean’s death is… Well, she can survive. She remembers a time when losing him would have killed her, but she’s spent the past year getting used to the idea.

No, what bothers her, what sends her swinging between near-catatonic and cold rage is the thought of Dean in hell.

Dean was absolutely right. Out of all of them, John Winchester is the only one with actual experience in hell. She hates him for saying it, because John won’t be alone in that for long and besides, Wendy’s experiences come as close as possible without actually getting a full ride downstairs.

Wendy knows more about hell than she cares to think about. She knows that physical torture has nothing on a demon torturing a soul. She knows that time moves differently in hell. “A year for every day on earth,” Alanna said once.

She knows how demons are made.

In her darker moods she just hopes she’s long dead by the time Dean (or what used to be Dean) crawls out of the Pit.

On other days (though she can’t say whether these are better or worse), when she’s cheerful to the point of hysteria, she hopes that Dean will break soon, because at least then the world will end, and maybe Wendy (and, probably by default, Hanna) will actually make it into Heaven.

***

All through May, she tries to stay in contact with Sam, but he stops taking her calls or replying to text messages pretty fast. When she asks Bobby, he tells her he only hears from Sam when ‘the idjit’ is unable to find the information he needs on his own, which isn’t nearly as often as Bobby would like.

***

In June she goes back to Oak Ridge.

She spends a day in her old house, just wandering around, touching things, looking at photographs. Remembering. She sits up in her room all night and when dawn begins to light the sky, she collects some things and leaves, heavy with a mixture of regret and relief.

***

In July Wendy breaks off contact with Bobby. Just turns her phone off and stashes it in the secret compartment with the weapons she no longer uses.

***

In August she writes him a letter to tell him she’s alive and well, and settling down. She asks him not to contact her again.

She avoids looking at the new photograph lying on the table beside her left hand.

***

In November she cuts her hair, takes a knife into the bathroom and cuts off her braid. The next day she goes to nearest hairdresser and has him cut her nearly as short as Dean’s.

***

They’re not lying when they tell Sam that they didn’t get married.

One reason is that they’re both legally dead, and they don’t want to get married using fake names.

Besides, it’s not like either of them _wants_ to get married in the first place. They’re fine the way they are. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

Instead they buy matching iron rings and have the jeweler engrave something on the inside. They never share that part with anyone else.

They don’t even make promises or anything, except a drunken, “Let’s never lie to each other.”

At the time, it’s enough.

***

The thing with Adam shakes Dean in ways he refuses to contemplate.

He’s already out of sorts when they get the call, what with finding his life recorded in a series of books (the Winchester Gospels? Really?), but at Adam’s funeral he finds himself fiercely missing Wendy.

He’s avoided thinking about her this past year (has it really been that long?), and the Apocalypse and Hell and Sam and the Angels have been helpfully keeping him occupied.

He’s already standing on her doorstep before it occurs to him that she probably doesn’t know that he’s back from the dead and, more importantly, still mostly himself (or at least not a demon). His hand hovers in front of the doorbell for a long moment as he wonders if it might not be better to just turn around and leave –

The door opens and a young woman wearing a baby sling nearly smacks into Dean.

Her eyes widen (so familiar) when she gets a good look at him, and she takes a step back and slams the door in his face. It takes him a moment to get past the very short and messy hair (not unlike Castiel’s, he thinks and then wants to smack himself for this association) and lack of glasses, to realize that this is –

“Wendy?”

“What the fuck are you?”

“I’m me. Dean.” He hears her growl ( full of fury and pain and grief) through the door and sighs. “Look, you can test me with holy water, silver, the whole shebang. At gunpoint if you’d like. Bobby did the same when I showed up at his place.”

Silence. After a few minutes a silver knife pokes out through the mail slot. “Cut yourself on it.”

Dean sighs again but reaches out to accept the knife. She doesn’t let it go so, sighing once more, he presses his arm against it and moves just enough to open a shallow cut.

Apparently, it’s enough. The knife disappears and there’s a snick as the door unlocks. A moment later Wendy says, “You can come in now.”

The door opens directly into the living room and there she is, keeping the couch as a barrier between them, the child still in its sling. She’s got a gun trained on him.

“There’s holy water in that glass,” she says, jerking her chin toward the coffee table.

Dean reaches instead for the salt shaker and pours a bit into his palm, licks it off, chases it down with the holy water.

Then he flops down on the couch, ignoring the gun still trained on him because her face tells him that she isn’t going to shoot him now, unless he gives her a damn good reason. And he has no intention of doing that.

“Why the fuck are you here?” she spits out at him, and then spends a minute shushing the kid.

He mentally runs through an assortment of different answers, all of them true, and rejects every one.

He shrugs, all casual, mostly because there’s absolutely nothing casual about any of this. “I needed a bit of a break. I’ve had Heaven and Hell on my ass all year, and Sam…” He shakes his head. Not going there.

She waves his words away and he tries not to flinch because she’s still got the gun in her waving hand. “No, I mean, why are you not in hell?”

He flinches again, visibly this time, and scowls. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t mean for it to sound so accusatory. He shrugs again, all casual. “Got pulled out by an angel.” He’ll show her the handprint later, when she’s relaxed a bit. “Castiel. Dude wears a trenchcoat,” he adds, laughter in his voice now.

There’s a little snick as Wendy flicks the safety back on, and she puts the gun down on the coffee table and begins to pace with a sway in her step Dean has never seen before, not on her. It reminds him of someone, but he can’t place the memory.

“So. Angels, huh?”

All the humor bleeds out of Dean. “Yeah. And they’re a bunch of grade-A dicks, too.”

“I get the feeling there’s a story there,” she says. “Why don’t you catch me up on what’s been happening while I do the weekend shopping.”

He nods. “Sure.” And follows her out the door, down the stairs, to her car. “You still driving this thing?”

“Well, I can’t put a car-seat in there, so I don’t drive much these days. And I haven’t spent the night since… September, I think. Locked myself in because there was a ghost after me. The secretary from the police station. Nancy.” Wendy shrugs, oblivious to the way Dean freezes. “She disappeared after a while. No idea why, but I’m not complaining.” She rummages around in the glove box, then steps back and locks the car. “Here,” she says, holding out her fist. “I think this belongs to you.”

He closes his hand around the things she drops automatically, and uncurls his fingers to find a ring lying on his palm. Iron, with the engraving they never told Sam about. At least that explains why Sam didn’t give it back.

***

Of course, Hanna chooses that exact moment to wake up and demand to be let out of the baby sling.

Wendy sees the startled look on Dean’s face when he gets a proper look at Hanna, and gives him a tight smile.

“Wow, thought the kid would be smaller.”

“Actually, she _is_ a bit small for her age. Probably because I chain-smoked my way through two thirds of the pregnancy.”

“How old is she?”

Wendy doesn’t look at him, sticks a pacifier in Hanna’s mouth and walks around to the back of the car to get the stroller. “She was born on November second. More than a week past the due-date. Her name is Hanna Mary.”

She watches out of the corner of her eye as he starts at the name, and then does some quick mental math, and sees the exact moment he reaches the correct conclusion.

“God, Wendy. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She glares at him and moves around the stroller to start pushing it toward the convenience store down the street. “I didn’t know. I got food poisoning in July and believe me, no one was more surprised to hear I was also pregnant. I was six months pregnant, and alone and sick, and then I went into withdrawal. And do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone who’ll rent to a jobless pregnant girl?”

Seems he’s got nothing to say to that, so they walk in silence for a while.

“So, when did you get back anyway?”

“September 18,” he says, with a calm that is obviously forced. “And the first thing Castiel told me was that he was an angel and I was supposed to prevent the apocalypse. It’s not going so great.”


End file.
